The paper aimed to analyze the effect of the application of organic fertilizer biohumus on the content of heavy metals in the soil and spring barley plants in the Donetsk industrial region of Ukraine. Application of biohumus in the organomineral nutrition system led to decrease the content of mobile forms of copper, zinc, lead, cadmium by 17.1%, 23.4%, 22.6% and 23.1% respectively. The content of copper and zinc in the grain was almost at the control level, the accumulation level of lead and cadmium in the spring barley grain decreased by 1.6 and 1.4 times, respectively. The variant of the organo-mineral nutrition system with foliar treatment of plants with biostimulant regoplant allows to reduce the amount of traditional mineral fertilizers by up to 50% while maintaining the yield level, to reduce the coefficients of biological absorption of lead and cadmium by 1.4 times compared to the control. To reduce the risk of soil and grain contamination by heavy metals in industrial regions, it is advisable to use an organo-mineral fertilizer system.

Determination of the combining ability of varieties and F1 of spring barley is a necessary element in breeding for productivity. The results of the analysis of the general combining ability (GCA) and specific combining ability (SCА) make it possible to organize work on a specific studied feature, to select components for obtaining new hybrid combinations. The method of diallelic crosses was used in the work. The effects of GCA and SCА of spring barley were revealed on the feature of ''duration of the germination-heading period''. Between the effects of GCA and the estimates of the feature ''duration of the seedling-heading period'' in varieties there is a high correlation, therefore the value of the feature is an analogous feature of the breeding value, as well as the GCA effect. The stability of GCA effects over the years does not differ from the stability of the germination-heading period, which indicates the same efficiency of selection for any of these features. In the context of climate change towards warming, the determination of the combining ability is an additional tool for predicting selections for this feature.